New paper alert! Microclimate temperatures are more extreme than we previously thought! Near-ground temperatures are amplified in hot weather, cool refugia is lost and replaced with heat traps ☀️🔥🥵 escape from heat will be very hard for small ground-dwelling organisms doi.org/10.21425/fob...

Had an absolutely fantastic time at #BES2025 and a massive well done to all speakers and presenters. Really enjoyed displaying my poster and research, representing two great unis, and meeting so many great people and potential collaborators. Glad my title brought as much joy to others as it did me!!

In my first Editorial as Associate Editor for @conphysjournal.bsky.social, we help combat this lack of training by providing some "tips and tricks" for writing constructive peer reviews, based on our collective experiences as editors for multiple scientific journals.

We are looking for PhD applicants! ‼️Interested in genomics, ecophysiology and adaptation? Look at our TREES DLA project: www.trees-dla.ac.uk/projects/und... We also offer more projects via ROUTE2. Get in touch and let’s have a chat 💬

Great to be a part of this study quantifying the potential negative effects of conservation work to protect one taxon on others! Turns out studying eels did not negatively affect water birds in this case🦆🦢👍

New paper out! 📢 We tested whether boat activity from an eel telemetry study disturbed protected waterbirds in a UK reservoir. 🦆 No evidence of disturbance. 🌦️ Bird numbers varied with weather + season. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

📣New paper out today! We’ve found concentrations of mercury in UK-harbour porpoises is increasing. 📈🐬 We also found concentrations of mercury were associated with an increased risk of dying from infectious disease.☠️ pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

"we ... employ Bayesian phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolutionary history of kissing." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Kissing evolved at least 21 million years ago. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @matildabrindle.bsky.social

🚨Job opportunity🚨 We are hiring a 3yr research technician. If you love fieldwork, are passionate about forests & mountains, and want to up-skill in remote sensing, sensor networks and running field experiments this could be the dream job for you! 🧪🌳⛰️🛰️🌡️🍄 www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Interested in thermal biology? Please join our new and growing grass roots initiative, the Thermal Ecology Alliance, initiated by @patricepottier.bsky.social. 🧪🐟🦑🌡️ Sign up here: www.thermalecologyalliance.org#participation Check who already signed up: www.thermalecologyalliance.org#community

Have had a very exciting and unexpected start to this week, travelling to Salford for an interview with BBC Breakfast talking all things #wasps! Many thanks to @waspwoman.bsky.social for trusting me with this opportunity, and the fantastic #WorldOfWasps at @uclgrantmuseum.bsky.social for the props!

We are recruiting for a Research Technician to support our lab's experimental evolution work with Drosophila melanogaster at UCL. Do you have recent insect husbandry experience and want to be a key part of an academic research environment? We'd love to hear from you www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Seeing a lot of racist pinkwashing bullshit about Muslims and homosexuality and it’s a good time to share how I was on the gay marriage beat for a decade and racist gays never believed me when I shared how US Muslims favored equal LGBT rights (52%) over Christian evangelicals (34%)!

🚨 Important paper for understanding limits on range expansions under climate change. 🚨 Wall Brown's shift their life history to expand polewards, but are ultimately limited by winter tolerance. Perhaps physiological tolerances just can't evolve at the same pace as other traits... 🦋❄️

New paper in @pnas.org — and this is my favourite one out of my PhD thesis! Field transplants of wall brown butterflies show life history evolution during climate change-driven range expansion, BUT non-evolving winter tolerance still sets the range limit.🧵1/12. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Do you know a young person with an interest in insects? 🦋 The Douglas Boyes Fund aims to provide people aged 14-18 with access to entomology equipment, fostering their passion for insects and inspiring them to engage and share their interest with other young individuals 🔽

Biology/Geography/Earth Sciences colleagues: can anyone recommend a field centre or similar field course location that works well for students who are wheelchair users? This is a no-fly course so we're trying to find somewhere in the UK or Western Europe

Black panther successfully hunting a dikdik last night. 🐈‍⬛ Definitely the best wildlife sighting of my life. 🥹 Incredibly lucky, and quite the cherry on top of a fantastic UCL undergraduate field course to Kenya! 🇰🇪 Recorded by student Aidan McAvoy.

Territorial behaviour in ecology and conservation damages careers and impedes progress in the field. 🌏🧪🌐

Closing tomorrow! Last chance to apply for postdoc to explore the role of animals in savanna ecosystem productivity & nutrient cycling! Link to job: tinyurl.com/53dy4584 #savanna #termites #largemammals

Autonomous locomotion simply with tubes as limbs, and no brain? 🎈🤖 Yes, through physical synchronization! Our article is out today in Science (@science.org) Article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Authors: @albertocomoretto.bsky.social, H.A.H. Schomaker, J.T.B. Overvelde More below 🧪 ⚛️ (1/6)

What do you do when there is heatwave and the meeting room is being refurbed? Take Journal Club to the park of course! Ice lollies provided. 🥵🍦 @uclcber.bsky.social

Today @owenrcorbett.bsky.social was crowned Dr Corbett, Doctor of Wasps! Congrats Owen! We are all so proud of you! @uclcber.bsky.social @uclnews.bsky.social @maxreuter.bsky.social Huge thanks to @jimlabisko.bsky.social @chrisleduck.bsky.social for examining!

🚨🐜!!! Check out our new paper where we investigate the impact of a soil level (SoilTemp) dataset on niche shifts of introduced ant species globally — using soil temperatures often lessens the extent of niche shifts between native and introduced ranges! 🐜 🐜 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🔎👀 TropEco Lab is hiring, please share! 🚨 🌍🌴 Position: Senior Research Associate / Research Associate in Field and Molecular Ecology. 🪲🐝🦋 Task: You will use iDNA & eDNA to build bee-plant and dung beetle-mammal networks in the Brazilian Amazonia, Ghana, & Malaysia. Further details -> bit.ly/4lurR9z

Last week I defended my thesis "Structure and Function of Insect Communities in Central Congo Peatland Forests" with minor corrections. Thanks to supervisors Jan Axmacher and Simon Lewis for their inspiration and support, and to examiners Tim Newbold (UCL) and Ed Turner (Cambridge). Now, to publish!

Great to see our new review on the causes and consequences of tropical insect declines out in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. 🪰🪲🐜🐛🐝🦋 It was a pleasure working with an international team of amazing tropical entomologists! 🧑‍🔬 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Super useful video library to liven up your presentations …

Out now in @pnas.org , we study the recovery dynamics of biodiversity across the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction. We quantify how species-area relationships – how diversity scales with geographic area – have changed for dinosaurs, mammals and others: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

For the first time, the Norwegian government has calculated the value to society of the health benefits of increased walking and cycling. 🚲 ~€2.8 for each additional km of cycling 🚶‍♀️ ~€4.2 for each additional km of walking

We're hiring a fieldworker to help with some of our projects in Wytham Woods this spring. Wonderful place to work (and live), especially in the spring. Get in touch if you'd like to know more.

🚨 New paper 🚨 Primate sensory evolution shows shifts in visual and olfactory systems 🦧👁️👃. Nice to see this is out, really cool combination of genomic, molecular and anatomical data! 🧬🧪🧠 Thanks to Hai Chi, Gang Li and co for having me on board. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#science #job Research fellow in Molecular Ecology @ucl-pnl.bsky.social 🧪

Happy to share we have a new postdoc position in "Biogeography of genetic diversity changes or Macrogenetics" at @utu.fi to work on large-scale patterns of genetic diversity using Lepidoptera= moths and butterflies 🦋🦋 Applications are open until March 10! ats.talentadore.com/apply/tutkij...

This is a room where we turn very modest salaries and budgets (and lots of coffee) into new knowledge, life-saving innovations, and technology that feeds business growth. It's literally the loom that spins hay into gold but these numpties are suddenly worried about the cost of hay.

In my column today I argue that, unbelievably, Labour are worse on environmental issues than the Conservatives. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If you missed Prof Ilya Maclean's talk "The art and science of prediction" earlier this week, you can view the full video recording below. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRIN... #esiChallengeOfTheMonth @exeter.ac.uk @crpr-exeter.bsky.social @uniexecec.bsky.social @ilyamaclean.bsky.social

I like this paper too, but (horn-tooting alert) alternatively, consider not doing model selection at all? doi.org/10.3390/e260... (FWIW I do feel a bit bad about publishing in an MDPI special issue [!!] - long story, I agreed to do it and then felt uncomfortable backing out - wouldn't do it again)

Between 2019 and 2023, researchers paid $8.968 billion to make papers open access. Imagine what else could be done with this money if it wasnt paid to for profit publishing companies... 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

New in @currentbiology.bsky.social Studies have found that fossil/molecular diversification rates scale with time, hinting at a disconnect between micro and macroevolution. We show that these trends are absent from the fossil record when controlling for sampling biases: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Researchers argue that abrupt biodiversity losses can be driven by populations sharing similar tolerances to warming in The Conversation. bit.ly/4jrL9vl More at Prof Ilya Maclean's #esiChallegeOfTheMonth talk "The art and science of prediction" next week www.exeter.ac.uk/research/ins... (1/2)

🚨 Cool paper 🚨 Really interesting and brilliantly written study by Guim Ursul and co here! Thermophilisation of communities of mountain butterflies. ⛰️🦋🥵 Check it out!

Please circulate: Postdoc position on responses of Australian mammal pests to climate change. Part of my ARC Laureate Fellowship research. Lots of hands-on fieldwork. Learn about biophysical models. Remote locations. Collaboration with #EcologicalHorizons and #AWC jobs.unimelb.edu.au/en/job/91880...

📢 Excited to share our new paper on differences in structuring tropical and temperate biodiversity in riparian forests. Brilliantly led by Liam Nash, with @gqromero.bsky.social @tim36chambers.bsky.social, Victor & Fatima - just published in Proceedings B: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The push I need to make it to Bluesky? A new paper to share! Here we use 30,000+ datapoints to show the potential for global assessments of water quality using citizen science. Spoiler: Forested catchments = lower nutrients. doi.org/10.5334/cstp...

Occasionally one stumbles across particularly remarkable specimens during the most basic tasks in Natural History museums 🏛️ In this case, I want to talk you about this 'Baronia brevicornis' (MNCN_Ent 378709), a butterfly considered a #living #fossil 🦋🦴

Different species often malfunction at the same temperature limit.

⚠️🌡️ Different organisms have very similar thresholds of heat tolerance: and that is both fascinating and frightening... However, I'm really glad to see this amazing review by @josephwilliamson.bsky.social and col. finally out there! Check it out now 👇🏻

Proud to have played a small part in the huge new study summarised in this article (I did bat-stuff), showing the differences in biodiversity-impacts between tropical forest degradation and conversion. theconversation.com/tropical-for... 🧪🌏🦇